Firms to Help Justice Dept. Track Cases
The Justice Department has awarded a $950 million contract to three companies to maintain the hodgepodge of systems used to track its litigation caseload while it rolls out a new information-sharing platform.
CACI International of Arlington, Labat-Anderson of McLean and Lockheed Martin of Bethesda each received awards under an umbrella contract that could generate as much as six years of work.
The contract calls for the companies to provide training, software maintenance and upgrades, database services and similar technology support. The firms will compete against each other for specific tasks.
Case management systems help Justice Department attorneys organize the mountains of evidence, legal briefs and other information used in prosecutions and civil suits. Senior department executives also use the systems to help supervise attorneys and track how the department allocates its resources.
The department's civil, antitrust, civil rights, criminal, environmental and natural resources divisions all keep their own case management systems, as do dozens of U.S. attorney's offices nationwide. The tax division is also developing a separate litigation support program, according to procurement documents.
But the separate case management systems don't yet permit seamless information exchange. Such information sharing can become critical in major cases that might, for example, involve both charges brought by the criminal division and related accusations of tax law violations.
In June 2006, the Justice Department awarded a $42 million contract to Computer Sciences of El Segundo, Calif., to build a central database and tools to allow officials to pool information from different case-management systems. Justice directed the company to deploy the system across the department in stages through 2010.
The department's plan for a centralized data sharing pool among the case management systems implements a key part of the Office of Management and Budget's Case Management Line of Business program. The OMB program calls for developing case management systems that meet the varying needs of investigative and administrative work as well litigation. Justice is the lead agency for the litigation case management phase of the program, while the FBI is carrying out the investigative system phase. No contracts have been awarded and a lead agency has not yet been named for the administrative phase.
The FBI's attempts to build a case-management system for law enforcement agencies, now known as Sentinel, illustrate the difficulties of the task. An earlier version of Sentinel, known as Virtual Case File, failed at the cost of more than $100 million. That forced the FBI to change its investigative business methods and adopt new software project management controls.
CACI, which has provided case management services to the department since 1978, said the company's Online Mega Web Portal, or OMega, would be included in the Justice litigation support project. OMega will give case managers "fast, secure and easy access to shared libraries, court calendars, project milestones and associated tools," CACI said.
Lockheed Martin said in a written statement that "through the acquisition of Aspen Systems, [it] has been providing litigation support services to federal customers since 1987." Labat-Anderson did not respond to e-mails seeking comment.
Wilson P. Dizard III is deputy news editor of Government Computer News. For more information on this and other technology contracts, go tohttp://www.gcn.com.
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